Victoria Brownworth

The more I think about health care reform, the crazier I get.

At present the House bill is, with the exception of the vile Stupak-Pitts Amendment, miles better than the Senate bill.

Yesterday Olympia Snowe was on Face the Nation talking about why she wouldn’t support the Senate bill. Her circular reasoning made absolutely no sense. And that is, overall, the problem with the Senate bill. No one talking about it is able to make a lot of sense of it. Al Franken makes it sound like the best thing since sliced bread, but it isn’t. Harry Reid is so thrilled he got 60 Democrats to vote on something–anything–he’s forgotten what’s actually in the bill. On Meet the Press yesterday,  Howard Dean, got the kind of serious grilling never given to Republicans. David Gregory tried to get Dean to abandon the whole idea of the Senate health care reform bill. Dean refused.

(read it here:  Dean hopes health bill can be fixed after Senate vote | Raw Story)

Here’s the moment of clarity I had while listening to both Snowe and Dean with a soupcon of the rantings of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell talking about how the Senate bill would mean the end of the world as we know it: Congress needs to get as close to the House bill as possible and as far away from the Senate bill as possible. The egregious issue of Stupak-Pitts is going to be a problem, and it’s difficult to see a resolution on that regardless of any other aspects of the bill. When it comes to abortion, the guys go nuts and there are simply not enough Democratic women to get Stupak-Pitts out of the bill.

Can we get the public option? Possibly. Can we get the Medicare buy-in? Even more likely than the public option. But for any of this to happen one thing has to be clear: Democrats have to form the same kind of coalition against the other side that Republicans have formed against them. In short, for health care reform to succeed, there has to be a spine uniting the Democrats.

Spine.

The person who should be that spine is President Obama. He should get every Democrat on the Hill together and put it this simply: If you aren’t for health care reform in its most comprehensive sense, then you aren’t a true Democrat and you aren’t supporting me, your President.

The time for rewarding bad behavior is over. Obama spent months lauding Snowe and Joe Lieberman. To what end? Evisceration of health care reform and a return to the debacle the Clintons experienced in 1993.

The Democrats should be asking for one thing for Christmas: Spine. And the American people should ask for nothing less, either.—-VAB